In 1996, Wojciech Staron documented Malgosia, his girlfriend, as she traveled the Siberian city Usolie-Sibirskoe and gave Polish language lessons to the descendants of exiled Poles. Captured on beautiful 16mm film, Siberian Lesson is the candid diary of a young teacher acclimating and falling in love, as well as a portrait of a community still reeling from the collapse of the Soviet Union.Many years after their Siberian journey, now a married couple with two children, Wojciech and Malgosia traveled to a very different place: Azara, a remote village in northern Argentina, where Malgosia once again taught Polish to fellow emigrants. In the gorgeous, startlingly intimate Argentinian Lesson, Wojciech also turns his 16mm camera on Janek, his 8-year-old son, and his friend Marcia, a bright Argentinian girl of Polish descent bravely contending with poverty.

As independent episodes, Siberian Lesson (1998) and Argentinian Lesson (2011) have screened at film festivals including True/False, RIDM and IDFA where they have earned Staron, today a renowned cinematographer who received a 2011 Berlinale Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Achievement in Cinematography, a reputation as a gifted documentarian. The Maysles Cinema is proud to premiere Two Lessons, a film that brings the two halves of Staron's project together for the first time.

Co-presented with Nonfiction Cinema Releasing. Special thanks to Chris Boeckmann.